I’m taking part in Wannibe Manisha’s Do You Wanna Jam 2026. We’re about halfway through now. It’s a good point to check in on where things stand and what remains.
The theme is “Unstable.” I’d actually prototyped a similar concept for a different jam a while back that didn’t quite work. This theme gave me a reason to go back and build it properly.
The idea is an infinite runner/platformer where the world decays behind the player as they move. The farther you get, the faster everything gets (including the decay itself).
I also added a second constraint on top of the jam. I’m testing a reusable game dev library I’ve been building called BF Tools. More on that in a future post. But it’s relevant here because it helped how fast the first day went.
Day One – Setup
I set up the project the morning the jam started.
- CI/CD pipeline to build and deploy to Itch automatically
- Custom packages imported: haptics, screen shake, screen flash, object pooling, event bus
- All of it routed into a global bootstrapper
Minus the CI/CD pipeline, that part took a few seconds thanks to the BF Tools package. So far, everything works great.
From there I set up a basic scene flow. Gameplay, title, options, credits. Just the standard shape a jam game needs.
Movement and the Core Loop
Once I locked in the game concept, I imported the movement controller from Laser Beast and added a dash. The dash isn’t correctly built for reusability. But it works well enough for a jam.
Progression runs through two connected systems.
- Score tracks distance traveled, one point per unit
- That score feeds a difficulty manager, which increases both camera scroll speed and the “decay line” speed as the player gets farther
I also brought in a custom automatic rule tile generator and built a small chunk system on top of it. I save chunks as prefabs and register them in a loader config. The loader picks one at random to spawn. I added three nearly empty chunks, just enough to confirm the system worked.
Closing the loop required three more pieces: a kill plane below the floor, a short wait room at the start so I don’t drop the player directly into danger, and an invisible trigger to start the run.
The core loop was done inside the first day. Which I have never done before. It looked bad and felt worse. But it ran start to finish. Everything after that was content and polish.
Day Two – Decay and Build Visuals
The second day went into the visual side of decay and assembly. The system runs on two invisible lines and a tilemap.
- Chunks load into the tilemap, which scrolls right to left
- Each line reads every tile in its column
- The build line enables the tile’s collider and triggers a shader that assembles the sprite
- The decay line disables the collider and triggers a shader that breaks the sprite apart
That’s the simplified version, of course. But it covers the mechanism.
Everything After That
The rest of the time went into systems that don’t really add new mechanics but you would expect in most games.
- Game over panel
- Config-driven credits tab, currently listing my two playtesters
- A baseline UI pass to lock in fonts and colors
- A handful of bugs fixed before the first playtest
- Placeholder pause menu, functional but not final
I also added rough mobile support. My nephews have seen my games before but never had a way to actually play one. It works, but it’s not polished yet.
For audio, I recorded a basic track in GarageBand and split it into separate stems. Each stem connects to the difficulty/score system at a configurable distance threshold, so the music gets more intense as the player gets farther. I know tools like FMOD handle this, but relearning it mid-jam wasn’t worth the time, in my opinion.
Where That Leaves Me
At the halfway mark, the core loop is done. The visual systems and the extra systems (mobile support, layered audio, a full juice pass) are also done. That’s way ahead of where I expected to be at this point.
What’s Left
The rest of today is going into leaderboard integration using danqzq’s Leaderboard Creator. Any time left today plus all of Thursday goes into additional hazards: spikes, pits, lasers…whatever fits. No new systems get added after Thursday.
Friday through Sunday is entirely art, audio, chunk content, and fixing whatever playtesters find.
Everything is available for playtesting here: https://brainfartstudio.itch.io/manisha-jam-2026. If you play it, be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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